This is a record of my teaching journey. I am entering my 16th year as an educator. I have taught at risk, post risk, regular ed, and honors. I have taught English, PE, science, math, history, geography, and government. My purpose is to have a place to put my thoughts and have others join the conversation. I am currently located at the Utah Education Network and have the opportunity to work with teachers from all over the great state of Utah as a technology trainer.

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Monday, July 20, 2015

At ISTE I heard about Kahoot while in the poster sessions. It was a quick view with little more than "we started using Quizizz, it's like Kahoot only better." If you have been to the poster sessions you know that they aren't the place for tutorials so jotted down Quizizz and moved on through the throng of people and noise. After getting back I reviewed my notes and decided to check out Quizizz for myself. This is what I found:

The biggest complaint about Kahoot is that if you are in large group, those in the back of the room can't see what is on the screen, cause the choices are at the bottom of the screen. This is alleviated in Quizizz. The answers are on the bottom still, with the same layout and color configuration, but you can read the choices on your device. Clearly a much needed upgrade.

Because Kahoot is set up in game show fashion you are competing against everyone in the room, this may or may not be at your pace. If you can't keep up it get's frustrating and many just give up. Quizizz is set up so that the experience is totally self paced. You are still competing but you go through the questions at your own pace by looking at your device, not the main screen. This automatically makes the experience unique and properly paced for each participant. You are still competing, and your score is based on accuracy and speed, but you can move through the game at your own pace.

One thing I really liked was that you could see what all the questions were without having to preview the quiz

Most everything is else is just like Kahoot. You can find premade Quizizz in the public forum and copy and modify them how you like. You can download the results in a csv file and import to a spreadsheet.

The only thing I didn't really like was after each question it shows a meme if you get the question wrong or right. You do have the option to turn this off in the settings so if you like it you can keep it, if not just turn it off.

A few features that would be nice to be added: being able to select more than one correct answer, being able to remove images from a question without deleting the question, and being able to size images and move text.

Tuesday, July 7, 2015

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool" Richard Feynman

When it comes to being aware of our learning this can be tricky. Sometimes we think we are learning and we really aren't and other times we think we didn't really learn and we did. Knowing whether you are learning is difficult because we can fool ourselves. Research has shown that there are many times students think they are learning and they are not. This is due to the fooling yourself effect.

Students don't arrive with blank slate, everyone comes in with preconceived ideas and misconceptions of what they think is right that in fact inhibits and impedes the learning process. As teachers we need to teach misconceptions to help students understand fact from fiction. This is on of the best ways for learning to stick long term (and let's face it, if it's not long term was it really learned?). Studies have shown that when misconceptions are taught students learn better even though they may not feel as confident with the material. Many times students feel confident but perform poorly because they didn't really learn. In other words the background information students brought in made them feel comfortable with the learning process, but they didn't really learn. This is where we live up to the quote.

As educators we have to be fully aware of this effect and really get students to feel uncomfortable about the learning. They need to be stretched and challenged. They need to experience first hand the 'why' and 'how'. Learning needs to be an active experience, it needs to be one where students are really pushed to consider multiple perspectives and the one they bring with them may need some reshaping.

If we aren't challenging our students then we may be fooling ourselves.